White House Challenges Republicans to Use Health Care for 2010 Election

Expressing an increasing confidence that a massive health care overhaul will pass Congress — despite dire warnings from Republicans about its impact on Democrats in November — White House officials on Sunday dared the GOP to bring it on during this fall’s 2010 midterm election.

“We’re happy to have the 2010 elections be about the achievement of health care reform. That’s a debate I think we’re obviously comfortable having,” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“Make my day,” added senior White House adviser David Axelrod.

“If the Republican Party wants to go out and say to that child who now has insurance or say to that small business that will get tax credits this year … you know what, we’re actually going to take that away from you and we don’t think that’s such a good idea, I say let’s have that fight,” Axelrod told ABC’S “This Week.” “I’m ready to have that and every member of Congress ought to be willing to have that debate as well.”

White House aides and House Democratic leaders have expressed increasing confidence they will get the 216 votes needed in the House to pass a Senate version of a health insurance overhaul that is not exactly what any Democrat wants but is more than no bill at all.

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Obama Plans ‘Backdoor’ Tax to Pay for Health Plan

Written By: Dan Weil

A stealth provision in President Obama’s latest healthcare proposal dramatically increases taxes on the wealthy — extending Medicare taxes for the first time to “unearned” investment income.

The new 2.9 percent tax would apply to interest, dividend, annuity, royalty, and rent payments.

Under current law, Medicare payments come from salaries alone.

But Obama wants a Medicare tax to be paid on the investment income accrued by individuals making more than $200,000 a year and couples making more than $250,000.

The plan doesn’t make it clear if capital-gains income is subject to the 2.9 percent tax. If it is, the wealthy would face a capital-gains tax rate of 22.9 percent. That’s because the rate already is slated to increase to 20 percent next year from 15 percent currently.

In addition, households with income above $250,000 would see another 0.9 percent added to their Medicare tax on their normal working income. It would put their rate at 2.35 percent.

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Va OKs 1st bill banning mandated health coverage

Virginia’s General Assembly became the first in the nation Wednesday to approve legislation that bucks any attempt by President Barack Obama and Congress to implement a national health care overhaul in individual states.

The Republican-ruled House of Delegates, with wide Democratic support, voted 80-17 without debate for the largely symbolic step aimed at the Democratic-backed reforms pushed by Obama and stalled in Congress. The vote sends the measure to Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell who intends to sign it.

Thirty-four other state legislatures have either filed or proposed similar measures — statutes or constitutional amendments — rejecting health insurance mandates, according to the American Legislative Exchange Counci

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Pelosi’s Republic

Written By: Mary Katharine Ham

From Rachel Maddow’s show last night, here’s a jaw-dropper from the woman who brought you, “We have to pass the bill, so you can find out what’s in it.” As I keep saying, the Democratic message mavens are working overtime, apparently to woo the all-important swing vote in Williamsburg to health care:

“Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance.”

If Pelosi wants us to imagine it, let’s do it with a few caveats, shall we? If liberal Boomers such as Nancy Pelosi insist on creating government incentives for a generation of people to be unemployed artists who nonetheless have their health care paid for by productive members of society, there will be fewer productive members of society.

If they insist on creating a generation unable to care for itself up to and past the ripe old age of 26 by incentivizing “children”—and I use to term loosely— to stay on parent’s health insurance policies until they’re turning the corner from Clearasil to Botox, there will be fewer educated, able-bodied people who ever learn to take care of themselves.

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Dems look to health vote without abortion foes

Written By: ERICA WERNER

House leaders have concluded they cannot change a divisive abortion provision in President Barack Obama’s health care bill and will try to pass the sweeping legislation without the support of ardent anti-abortion Democrats.

A break on abortion would remove a major obstacle for Democratic leaders in the final throes of a yearlong effort to change health care in the United States. But it sets up a risky strategy of trying to round up enough Democrats to overcome, not appease, a small but possibly decisive group of Democratic lawmakers in the House.

Democratic leaders are working to rally rank-and-file members around last-minute agreements on several sticking points, health insurance taxes and prescription drug coverage among them, and dozens of other complicated issues – all as Republicans stand ready to oppose the overhaul en masse.

“We will finish the job,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wrote in a letter to his Republican counterpart describing the path ahead.

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Senate Health Bill Would Up Costs for Millions in Middle Class, Analysis Finds

A nonpartisan study is casting new doubt on President Obama’s campaign pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class.

The Senate health care bill crucial to saving President Obama’s signature domestic initiative will hit the wallets of a quarter of all Americans making less than $200,000 per year, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Joint Tax Committee that assessed the way the bill would hit taxpayers directly through new taxes and fees and indirectly through taxes levied on health care providers and passed on to consumers.

The committee also determined that the bill would subsidized insurance premiums for 7 percent of taxpayers — about 13 million people — while some 73 million people would face higher costs from the new fees and taxes.

The potential tax increases in the bill could pose significant problems for the president as he makes his final push for health care reform because he promised to protect middle-class Americans from any tax hikes. Republicans already are pouncing on the committee’s analysis.

“For every family that gets some benefit from this program, in other words, a premium subsidy, three families are going to get a tax increase and those three families obviously include the bulk of people you’d call middle class America,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told Fox News.

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Nancy Pelosi: Health care was ‘hijacked’

Written By: ANDY BARR

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi concedes that Democrats allowed the health care reform debate to be “hijacked” by insurance companies and other interests set on killing the bill.

Pelosi, in the second part of an interview with PBS’s Charlie Rose that aired Wednesday, said that early Democratic messaging attempts were plagued by the fact that the House and Senate had yet to come to any agreement about what would be in the bill.

“When you don’t (have) a bill yet, anyone can characterize it any way you want,” the California Democrat said. “I think that while there’s some well-intentioned people who have concerns about budget and this and that, a lot of that sentiment was hijacked by a concerted effort on the part of the insurance companies and their supporters to make sure we don’t a bill.”

“They could characterize it any way they wanted,” she added. “They could focus the debate.”

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Sick man faces bankruptcy — or death

Written By: MARK BONOKOSKI

Kent Pankow lives in Edmonton, in a province and a country that is trying to either kill him or bankrupt him.

No sense mincing words.

Suffering from brain cancer, Kent Pankow was literally forced to go to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. for lifesaving surgery — at a cost to family and friends of $106,000 — after the health-care system in Alberta left him hanging in bureaucratic limbo for 16 crucial days, his tumour meanwhile migrating to an unreachable part of the brain, while it dithered over his case file, ultimately deciding he was not surgery worthy.

Now, with the Mayo Clinic having done what the Alberta Cancer Board wouldn’t authorize or even explain, but with the tumour unable to be totally removed, the province will now not fund the expensive drug, Avastin, that the Mayo prescribed to keep him alive and keep the remaining tumour from increasing in size — despite the costs of the drug being totally funded by the province for other forms of cancer.

Kent Pankow, as it turns out, has the right disease but he has it in the wrong place.

Had he lung cancer, breast cancer, or colon cancer, then the cost of the drug — $4,555 per treatment, two times a month — would be totally covered by Alberta’s version of OHIP.

But he doesn’t.

And so he is not only a victim of brain cancer, he is also a victim of arbitrary discrimination.

Full disclosure. Kent Pankow, a 40-year-old Red Seal sous chef, is a son of the man who married the spouse of my late brother. And it was while vacationing with them at their winter home in Los Cabos, Mexico, recently that this story began to unfold back in their home province of Alberta.

But do not think, even for a moment, that this could never happen in Toronto or other parts of Ontario.

Our supposedly universal federal health care system, the pride of most Canadians and the political struggle of America, is only as good as the length of the waiting line and whether you have the right disease at the right time.

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One of America’s clearest thinkers hits the bulls eye again with his analysis of the most critical failing of our education system and its role in our current political quagmire.

Thomas Sowell’s essay entitled Artificial Stupidity was published in The National Review Online which features many excellent articles.

The American education system focuses more on politically correct crusades than intellectually correct arguments.

A woman with a petition went among the crowds attending a state fair, asking people to sign her petition demanding the banning of dihydroxymonoxide. She said it was in our lakes and streams, and now it was in our sweat and urine and tears.

She collected hundreds of signatures to ban dihydroxymonoxide — a fancy chemical name for water. A couple of comedians were behind this ploy. But there is nothing funny about its implications. It is one of the grim and dangerous signs of our times.

This little episode revealed how conditioned we have become, responding like Pavlov’s dog when we hear a certain sound — in this case, the sound of some politically correct crusade.

People are all born ignorant but they are not born stupid. Much of the stupidity we see today is induced by our educational system, from the elementary schools to the universities. In a high-tech age that has seen the creation of artificial intelligence by computers, we are also seeing the creation of artificial stupidity by people who call themselves educators.

The experiences of life can help people outgrow whatever they were indoctrinated with. What may persist, however, is the lazy habit of hearing one side of an issue and being galvanized into action without hearing the other side — and, more fundamentally, not having developed any mental skills that would enable you to systematically test one set of beliefs against another.

It was once the proud declaration of many educators that “We are here to teach you how to think, not what to think.” But far too many of our teachers and professors today are teaching their students what to think — about everything from global warming to the new trinity of “race, class, and gender.” Even if all the conclusions with which they indoctrinate their students were 100 percent correct, that would still not be equipping students with the mental skills to weigh opposing views for themselves, in order to be prepared for new and unforeseeable issues that will arise over their lifetimes, after they leave the schools and colleges.

Many of today’s “educators” not only supply students with conclusions, but promote the idea that students should spring into action because of these prepackaged conclusions — in other words, vent their feelings and go galloping off on crusades, with neither a knowledge of what is said by those on the other side nor the intellectual discipline to know how to analyze opposing arguments.

When we see children in elementary schools out carrying signs in demonstrations, we are seeing the kind of mindless groupthink that causes adults to sign petitions they don’t understand or, worse yet, follow leaders they don’t understand, whether to the White House, the Kremlin, or Jonestown.

A philosopher once said that the most important knowledge is knowledge of one’s own ignorance. That is the knowledge that too many of our schools and colleges are failing to teach our young people.

Will Rogers once said that it was not ignorance that was so bad but “all the things we know that ain’t so.” But our classroom indoctrinators are getting students to think that they know after hearing only one side of an issue. It is artificial stupidity.

Please read the entire article here“

Why Obama Can’t Move the Health-Care Numbers

Written By: SCOTT RASMUSSEN AND DOUG SCHOEN

In 15 consecutive Rasmussen Reports polls conducted over the past four months, the percentage of Americans that oppose the plan has stayed between 52% and 58%. The number in favor has held steady between 38% and 44%.

The dynamics of the numbers have remained constant as well. Democratic voters strongly support the plan while Republicans and unaffiliated voters oppose it. Senior citizens—the people who use the health-care system more than anybody else and who vote more than anybody else in midterm elections—are more opposed to the plan than younger voters. For every person who strongly favors it, two are strongly opposed.

Why can’t the president move the numbers? One reason may be that he keeps talking about details of the proposal while voters are looking at the issue in a broader context. Polling conducted earlier this week shows that 57% of voters believe that passage of the legislation would hurt the economy, while only 25% believe it would help. That makes sense in a nation where most voters believe that increases in government spending are bad for the economy.

When the president responds that the plan is deficit neutral, he runs into a pair of basic problems. The first is that voters think reducing spending is more important than reducing the deficit. So a plan that is deficit neutral with a big spending hike is not going to be well received.

But the bigger problem is that people simply don’t trust the official projections. People in Washington may live and die by the pronouncements of the Congressional Budget Office, but 81% of voters say it’s likely the plan will end up costing more than projected. Only 10% say the official numbers are likely to be on target.

As a result, 66% of voters believe passage of the president’s plan will lead to higher deficits and 78% say it’s at least somewhat likely to mean higher middle-class taxes. Even within the president’s own political party there are concerns on these fronts.

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Durbin: Of Course Premiums Will Still Go Up With Obamacare

Final ‘reform’ push: twisting arms

Written By: MICHAEL TANNER

President Obama’s attempts to ram health- care reform through an increasingly reluctant Congress are starting to resemble a really eventful episode of “The Sopranos.”

Whether or not you believe former Rep. Eric Massa’s bizarre accusations of locker-room confrontations and conspiracies to drive him from office, there is no doubt that the Obama administration and its congressional allies are willing to use every trick in the book to get this bill passed.

They’ve already bought votes with pork and special deals — the “Louisiana purchase” ($300 million to bolster that state’s Medicaid program, which swayed Sen. Mary Landrieu); the “Cornhusker kickback” ($100 million to Medicaid there, sweetening the pot for Sen. Ben Nelson), and Florida’s “Gator Aid” (a Medicare deal potentially worth $5 billion, a hefty price for Sen. Bill Nelson’s vote). Plus the millions for Connecticut hospitals, Montana asbestos abatement and so on.

Nor were the Obamans willing to let a little thing like election laws stand in the way. They rewrote Massachusetts law to allow for an appointed senator to hold office for several months, hoping to get the bill through before the special election that Scott Brown ultimately won. Their plans spoiled, they even considered holding up Brown’s seating to let the appointed senator continue to vote on health care — until public outrage forced them to back down.

And, of course, there has been an unprecedented willingness to ignore congressional rules — from the failure to appoint a “conference committee” to negotiate differences between the House and Senate bills, to their current plans to use the reconciliation process to bypass a Republican filibuster.

Expect the tactics to get even dirtier now.

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Senate Health Care Bill Dead on Arrival, Pro-Life House Democrats Say

Written By: Carl Cameron

The health care reform bill passed by the Senate on Christmas Eve appears to be dead on arrival in the House, as seven anti-abortion Democrats intend to join the ranks of lawmakers who plan to vote against the legislation, Fox News has confirmed.

Seven new no votes would be enough to kill the Senate bill, and several more fence-sitting lawmakers are under pressure from both sides of the aisle.

Foremost among the seven new no votes is Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., whose anti-abortion amendment to the House version of the legislation got the bill passed in that chamber last year.

But because the Senate and House Democratic leaders weren’t able to agree on joint legislation before losing their supermajority in the Senate this year, they have few options other than getting the House to pass the Senate bill and then making changes to the law through a separate budget reconciliation bill that could pass with simple majorities.

The Senate bill, however, doesn’t contain the same language as the Stupak amendment, which explicitly prohibits federal funding of abortion in any of the reform measures intended to expand health care coverage to millions of uninsured Americans.

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So we have to pass the bill before we can know what’s in it. Incredible!

U.S. “cap and trade” rebranded “pollution reduction”

Reporting by Thomas Ferraro; Writing by Richard Cowan, Editing by Cynthia Osterman

Like a savvy Madison Avenue advertising team, senators pushing climate-control legislation have decided to scrap the name “cap and trade” and rebrand their product as “pollution reduction targets.”

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Kerry Blames Talk Radio for Lagging Global Warming Concerns Spurred by ClimateGate

Written By: Jeff Poor

ClimateGate, when a hacker broke into computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit and released a myriad of confidential files, continues to cause controversy. The documents showed scientists had attempted to suppress and manipulate data that would hurt the case proving anthropogenic global warming. They also cast doubts about what sort of policy measures should be implemented to attack this alleged global problem.

However, according to Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it’s not ClimateGate – but the messenger who is at fault for growing hesitation to enact a cap-and-trade policy that would radically change the U.S. economy. Although traditional media went for weeks without reporting the matter, it was talk radio that busted the story wide open and the target of Kerry’s frustration, which he revealed in an interview with the Boston Globe on March 8. (h/t Matt Dempsey, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee)

“What we have to do is go on the offensive,” Kerry said. The science “has been maligned and misinterpreted, and we need to fight back . . . people [need to] stop being moved by these talk show [hosts] and start looking for the facts” themselves.”

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In Denial. The meltdown of the climate campaign

Written By: Steven F. Hayward

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance. The somnolent American media, which have done as poor a job reporting about climate change as they did on John Edwards, have largely averted their gaze from the inconvenient meltdown of the climate campaign, but the rock solid edifice in the newsrooms is cracking. Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

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Gore: Organized Campaign Behind Climate Skeptics

Former Vice President Al Gore says critics of his global warming warnings are part of a “massive, organized campaign.”

Appearing on the Norwegian talk show “Skavlan” to promote his newest book “Our Choice,” Gore said:

“There has been a very large, organized campaign to try to convince people that it [global warming] is not real, to try to convince people that they shouldn’t worry about it.

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‘Trust’ Gap Between House, Senate Dems Hurting Health Care Push

House Democrats’ distrust of the Senate is turning up as a major roadblock to passing health care reform. And they’re playing right into Republicans’ hands.

With President Obama pushing anew to pass the health care package through Congress in the coming weeks, several House Democrats have voiced concern that the Senate could betray them if they go along and pass its version of the health bill.

“The Senate has given us a lot of reason not to trust them,” Rep. Jason Altmire, D-Pa., who voted against the House bill last year and is currently undecided, told “Fox News Sunday.”

Trust is such a key factor because the end game for health care reform involves House lawmakers passing the Senate-passed bill, and then crossing their fingers in hopes that the Senate will follow up with a packages of changes to get it more in line with what many House Democrats want to see. That bill could, under the scenario, be passed with a simple majority by using the controversial tool known as reconciliation.

But what if the Senate never passes a second bill?

That question is one that Republicans have tried to raise and is apparently nagging at Democrats.
Altmire said Sunday that the trust factor could be a stumbling block.

“Certainly that’s a key component of the dynamic of getting the votes — is there has to be some certainty that the Senate is going to follow through on their part,” he said.

He said the thought that the Senate would leave the House hanging “gives me concern.”

Other Democrats have suggested the House should not budge until the Senate passes the package of changes — though it’s not clear if that’s even allowed under Senate rules.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., told CBS News last week that the Senate “has been the single problem” with getting the bill out of the House. He referenced the hundreds of bills that have languished in the Senate after passing the House.

“Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me 290 times, shame on you,” Weiner said.

The paranoia about the Senate turning its back on the House has been fed by Republicans hoping to send the bill back to the drawing board.

“Once they pass that bill, what’s the incentive for anyone here (in the Senate) to do anything?” Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said last week. “I don’t see the incentive for them to pass a reconciliation bill.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also suggested the Senate could sit on the package of fixes.

“The House has to trust the Senate that we’ll go back in and fix the most egregious political problems,” he told ABC News’ “This Week” on Sunday.

Trust is hardly the only roadblock, though it is a big one. Another hurdle seemingly getting higher by the day is restrictions on abortion funding.

The House-passed bill was considered far stricter on that issue, and many House Democrats have threatened to reject the Senate bill without more assurances.

“Given the vote dynamic, abortion may be the decisive issue,” Altmire said.

Cleaver: Obama doesn’t have the votes to pass health care reform

Written By: Steve Kraske

Congressman Emanuel Cleaver said today on KCUR’s “Up to Date” that President Barack Obama doesn’t have the votes to pass health care reform in the U.S. House.

“We’re not at 217,” Cleaver said, referring to the number needed to pass the bill.

Later, the three-term Democrat from Kansas City said the passage number could be 216 given vacancies in the House.

The count today, Cleaver said, is about 201 health care supporters.

That number, he added, could fluctuate significantly as a final vote nears.

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Obama pleads for health Rx – for sake of presidency

Written By: GEOFF EARLE

President Obama yesterday pushed wavering House members to OK health-care legislation for his own political standing and for theirs, as the battle came down to a bare-knuckle brawl for votes.

Obama met with groups of liberal and more conservative Democrats in the White House to try to assemble a winning coalition.

“To maintain a strong presidency, we need to pass the bill,” Obama told the liberals, according to Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.), who attended the meeting.

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Boehner says he expects health bill to hit House floor ‘within days’

Written By: Michael O’Brien

House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said Thursday he expects Democrats’ healthcare bill to hit the House floor “within days.”

Boehner said he expects the debate over healthcare to begin, in earnest, as Democrats in the House prepare to take up the health bill passed by the Senate last Christmas Eve.

“I think we’re within days of this bill coming to the floor of the House,” Boehner said during an appearance on Fox News. “It’s pretty clear that the president, Speaker Pelosi, and Majority Leader Reid want to do everything they can to jam this bill through the House and the Senate to get it to the president’s desk.”

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SEIU Wants to Unionize Doctors

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Kathryn in Colleyville, Texas. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. It’s great to talk to you.

RUSH: Thank you very much.

CALLER: I was calling about Medicare and the slow erosion of freedom within the doctor community. Basically over the past two or three months, cardiology has been taken incredible pay cuts, which are impacting the practice of medicine.

RUSH: Medicare and Medicaid particularly, you mean, right?

CALLER: Medicare, yes.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Specifically, a couple of months ago the imaging that is performed in cardiologists’ office took a 40% pay cut, and that was followed up this past Monday with a 20% pay cut to all physicians. It’s really affecting how patients are getting taken care of. We had to lay off some employees, and it’s really touch and go whether we’ll be able to continue to see Medicare patients.

RUSH: I was just going to say: Your only hope is to get out of the program.

CALLER: Well, there is an out, which a lot of cardiologists — about, probably, 30% — have already accepted. Hospitals are buying out cardiology practices, only to become employees of hospitals.

RUSH: Yeah. I know.

CALLER: Huh. And that’s (garbled).

RUSH: But once you opt out of Medicare you can’t take a Medicare patient ever again, right?

CALLER: I’m not sure all the rules. I’m probably out of my territory there, but there are specific rules for not taking care of Medicare patients. But the problem is that once you’re an employee of a hospital you’ve lost your freedom, and some practices that have been bought out have already been told by the hospitals that, “Oh, well, we’re going to have to cut your pay 15%, and you have no recourse.”

RUSH: All right. I want to try to put what you’ve said here into an understandable context for the audience.

CALLER: Thank you, Rush.

RUSH: No, no, no. Stay on the line here because I need you to tell me if I’m right or wrong on this.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: The odds are I’m right (I’m very seldom wrong) but I still want you there to correct me. Now, the very people who just yesterday in a big dog and pony show said, “We’re going to expand coverage, we’re going to insure 31 million more people, we’re going to lower costs,” the same people are reducing what they are paying you and your husband, cardiologists, to the point that you cannot keep your practices going?

CALLER: That’s basically it. It’s a huge part of this. Probably 50% of local cardiology business is Medicare.

RUSH: Well, of course it is.

CALLER: It’s a very successful business. Let me tell you that over the past ten years… You know, heart disease was the number one killer ten years ago. But do you know that in the last ten years the mortality has dropped 30% because of cardiology care?

RUSH: Yeah. Oh, I’m not surprised. Despite all these horrors like childhood obesity, the life expectancy just continues to edge upward in this country.

CALLER: That’s right.

RUSH: But my point with you, Kathryn, is that the very people who claim they know how to fix this are breaking what we have now.

CALLER: Exactly. What we have now is already so broken that basically insurance companies and government have doctor groups fighting among ourselves for what’s left of our 8% of the Medicare dollar. About 8% of what goes through Medicare actually makes it to doctors. Everything else is wasted.

RUSH: Thank you, Kathryn. I want to make another point about this, ladies and gentlemen. I want to go back to my old buddy Howard Fineman and his piece earlier this week in Newsweek in which he wondered, “Where’s all the money going?” Where’s all the money going if they’re cutting the doctors? Well, the money isn’t there. We don’t have it. We have a $1.5 trillion deficit. The money is owed. The money is going to debt. But this is the real point. You listen to this doctor. I could do this all three hours any day I wanted. I could take calls from doctor after doctor after doctor who would tell the same story: Medicare payments, copayments are being cut back to the point that they can’t continue to keep the office open on what the government is paying them.

You have cardiology patients, heart patients, going in to get treated, and some far-off bureaucrat somewhere… Not an insurance company. We’re talking Medicare here, not some evil insurance company. Some federal bureaucrat is deciding what the cardiologist is going to get paid. That’s not a free market. There’s no relationship to Kathryn’s patients and the price of Kathryn’s service. The patient isn’t paying diddly-squat, or very little on Medicare and even less on Medicaid if we lump that in. We’ll leave Medicaid out of it for now. There’s absolutely no relationship. These people walk in with a heart problem. The service and the fee attached to it by Kathryn and her husband the cardiologists is not based on that woman’s ability to pay or the patient’s ability to pay or the patient’s level of care that’s needed, treatment, what have you.

Some bureaucrat that nobody knows, sitting far away in some dank federal office, is using a computer with printouts and models — formulas and so forth — to determine what the doctor rendering the service is going to be paid. This is price fixing. This is government control. We already have this. This is why it’s messed up. Now, we can get lost in the details here of the doctor’s only getting reimbursed this or they’re having their payments bundled here or what have you. That’s not the point. The problem is, imagine if you had to check into a hotel this way and the room is 400 bucks a night, and some federal bureaucrat says, “We’re only going to pay the hotel a hundred bucks for this,” and the hotel has to give you the room! It can’t be sustained.

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Charles Krauthammer: For Obama, health care show must go on

Written By: Charles Krauthammer

So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts’ devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House “summit” with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans’ way.

So the yearlong production, set to close after Massachusetts’ devastatingly negative Jan. 19 review, saw the curtain raised one last time. Obamacare lives.

After 34 speeches, three sharp electoral rebukes (Virginia, New Jersey and Massachusetts) and a seven-hour seminar, the president announced Wednesday his determination to make one last push to pass his health care reform.

The final act was carefully choreographed. The rollout began a week earlier with a couple of shows of bipartisanship: a Feb. 25 Blair House “summit” with Republicans, followed five days later with a few concessions tossed the Republicans’ way.
…
…even strong Obama supporter Warren Buffett [went] public with his judgment that the current Senate bill, while better than nothing, is a failure because the country desperately needs to bend the cost curve down and the bill doesn’t do it. Buffett’s advice would be to start over and get it right.

Obama has chosen differently, however. The time for debate is over, declared the nation’s seminar leader in chief. The man who vowed to undo Washington’s wicked ways has directed the Congress to ram Obamacare through, by one vote if necessary, under the parliamentary device of “budget reconciliation.” The man who ran as a post-partisan is determined to remake a sixth of the U.S. economy despite the absence of support from a single Republican in either house, the first time anything of this size and scope has been enacted by pure party-line vote.

Surprised? You can only be disillusioned if you were once illusioned.

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Hundreds of NHS wards to be shut in secret plans

Written By: Robert Winnett, Holly Watt and Christopher Hope

Plans that could lead to the closure of hundreds of hospital wards are being drawn up but will not be made public until after the general election, opposition parties have said.

Last year, the Government asked NHS authorities to come up with proposals to reorganise the service to save money as a result of the recession. Details have started to emerge of what is likely to be a rolling programme of cuts that contrasts sharply with assurances from Labour and the Tories that the NHS was “safe”.

So far, only the plans for London have come to light. Campaigners claimed the proposals threatened services such as casualty and maternity units at 13 out of 36 hospitals in the capital.

The failure of health authorities in other areas to disclose their response has prompted allegations that proposed closures, which could be politically damaging to the Government, will not be published until after polling day.

The scale of the cuts has caused a rebellion among Labour ministers who have openly defied the Government by publicly protesting at closures at their local hospitals.

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